It's going to be one of those days :(

First, my Lotuslive account stops working.
Then I receive the following reply after I emailed Lotus asking for assistance to fix the problem...

Maybe Comcast had a quiet word with Lotus after my last blog post?
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I'll admit it... I was wrong.

I thought Master Appliance Service of Hornsby NSW had the world record for bad customer service but they have been comprehensively beaten into second place by Whirlpool - the company whose appliances they were called in to fix.

A month ago I posted about our woes in trying to get our dishwasher fixed. My main beef at the time was that the repair technician didn't know which of the circuit boards on our dishwasher *might* be faulty so he wanted us to replace both of them. I objected to paying a non-refundable $950 plus service call for replacing two circuit boards when there was no guarantee that those new parts would fix the problem, so I went to Whirlpools web site to tell them of the situation and I received an automated email in reply thanking me for my input.

Fast forward to today and we receive a voicemail from the appliance repair company asking whether we still want the circuit boards. This reminds me that I haven't heard back from Whirlpool so I ring their customer support line and am told by John that they don't read the feedback they receive on their web site. However, as a consolation prize, he assures me that they do read their snail mail and offers me a postal address for Whirlpool so I can put my complaint in writing ...

Amazing stuff, but it does explain why I haven't heard back from them.
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Just when you think customer service can't get worse...

Imagine trying to get away with this level of "customer service" in the IT world.

We have an eight year old Whirlpool dishwasher which died recently. A service technician came out and unsuccessfully tried some fixes before deciding that the problem lay in the circuit boards. I can accept that - dishwashers create lots of steam and there may be corrosion on a contact somewhere. The technician disappeared to get information on replacing the board and nothing happened for a fortnight until we followed up with a series of phone calls.

To cut a long story short, we had a call last night from a person working in spare parts who advised up that the parts were now available - two separate circuit boards costing $450 and $500. So add in a service call and we were probably looking at over $1,000 to fix our dishwasher.

• Why couldn't the technician who came out to see us figure out which of the boards were faulty - the spare parts person didn't know.
• Could replacing just one of the boards fix the problem? - the spare parts person didn't know.
• If replacing the two circuit boards didn't fix the problem then would we get the cost of those parts refunded? - Of course not... now did we want the parts or not?

The dishwasher is long out of warranty and I don't have a problem paying for a replacement part plus a service call to install the part. What blows my tiny little mind is the Whirlpool corporate attitude that puts the responsibility for diagnosing and fixing the problem back on the customer. Apparently they are quite happy to keep selling us additional spare parts until we stumble across the one that makes it all better.

Both the technician who made the original service call and the person selling us the parts were courteous but I can't say the same for the corporate policy on repairing their equipment. I'll send this information to Whirlpool and if they want to give me their give me their version of the story then I'm happy to give them equal time on this blog.

NOTE: It wasn't a Whirlpool technician who originally came out to see us - it was an appliance service organization - but if Whirlpool authorizes them to resell Whirlpool parts and service Whirlpool equipment then Whirlpool will cop the PR flack when it all goes wrong.

"Guess who's mum won't be buying another Whirlpoool".
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Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

Yesterday I started working with a customer is having all sorts of troubles getting his integrated backup s/w to work with newly upgraded (R8.02 to R8.5) virtualized Domino servers. Now I'm not going to mention the backup s/w name at this point since negotiations are still underway with the vendor about what his documentation meant when he said it " ... supports Domino R8.x ", but I am interested in what experience other people have with backing up R8.5 Domino servers.

What software do you recommend and what do you curse?
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An IBM Call Center goof...

I've been working through a Lotus Foundations technical support issue with IBM over the last couple of weeks and my call has been bounced between call centers in Australia, India and Canada during that time. The Indian call center asked me to send them a server snapshot to assist them in understanding the problem and they also asked for remote access to my server. I don't have a problem with either of those requests and dutifully sent off the information. The Indian Call Center blew their credibility when they reviewed my server configuration and emailed me:

"I got following IP address eth0 192.168.0.1 and eth1 xx.xxx.xxx.xxx from snapshot. However unable to access LFS from both IP address. Please confirm correct IP address to access server remotely. "

I believe that people from India can be as smart and professional and technically adept as anyone else, but when a technician tries to remotely access a customer's systems using 192.168.0.1 then I think some basic network training is urgently needed.

BTW The Australian IBM Call Center was polite, professional and knew their stuff. They even assisted by sending me a CD by overnight courier when I admitted I'd already blown my 10gb internet cap for the month and couldn't download a required system update. My thanks to Graham Gill and Daniel Lui on the 127.0.0.1 Team.
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